Horus Heresy

Overall score:

Horus Heresy is a version of the Warhammer 40k CCG, comprising several different expansion sets. The title refers to the defining moment in Warhammer 40k history—the betrayal of the Emperor’s Warmaster, Horus, who joined the forces of Chaos and led half of the Space Marines in an assault on the Imperial Palace. Most of the Warhammer 40k universe is defined in some way by this event, and yet it happened in such a distant past that it has never really been explored in the games or fiction based on the mythos. The Horus Heresy CCG does a fairly good job, but suffers from some poor graphic design that puts much of their hard work to waste. It is an excellent game, however, in terms of how it actually plays, and interested players would be well-advised to work their way past the obstacles.

The basic mechanics are almost identical to the previous version of the game, which I heralded in a former review as the future of CCGs…and was vindicated a few months later when Wizards of the Coast released their Star Wars CCG and used many of Warhammer’s innovations. Traditional ideas of drawing, holding, and playing cards were turned on their heads in favor of a system that accurately simulated the tactics and feel of the Warhammer 40k tabletop game. You truly feel as if you are directing an army at war, and the few refinements Horus Heresy has made to the original rules only serve to enhance that. The first is the removal of fleet cards, which were fairly limiting and dull—the new version has individual ship cards that allow you to build your own fleet and support your army from orbit. The second is the beefing up of assault—shooting is still a strong option, but it is no longer the no-brainer choice that it used to be, because assaults now offer some pretty big advantages. Certain units have “special assaults” with effects other than destroying a unit—things like forcing the opponent to discard three cards, or allowing one of your locked units to shoot. Assaulting units are also now able to make a sweeping advance—if they kill their target and still have some power left over, they can immediately take the fight to a new target and potentially kill it as well. The boosts to assault help make the battlefield choices more strategic, more difficult, and more fun.

A subtle tweak that’s not an actual rules change is that many units now have more balanced stats. In the old version it was most common to see units that were strong at one thing (firepower for shooting, assault for assaulting, or speed for blocking) and bad at everything else; the new units are much more adaptable, which means you have more options in battle. This can be a bad thing in same cases, as certain units feel too unfocused or homogenized, but for the most part it works very well.

Horus Heresy’s only real fault in terms of gameplay is the limitation to two factions: loyalists and traitors (the two groups that will eventually become Space Marines and Chaos, respectively). Two-sided games make multiplayer awkward, sealed games difficult and draft virtually impossible—there just not a lot of play variants with only two clearly defined teams. It’s a necessary evil for the setting, of course, and an ideal way to tell the story, but the game was more interesting back when it had four factions. On the other hand, the odds that you’ll open a card you can use from any given booster have greatly improved, so it’s a tradeoff. Personally, I look forward to the next series, called Dark Millennium, which will return the game to the current 40k timeline and reintroduce key races such as Orks and Eldar.

In mentioning the story of the Horus Heresy, it should be mentioned that the art designers for the game have gone to great lengths to create and maintain and proper feel—they retro-engineered the “modern” armor and appearance of the Space Marines and came up with a believable, consistent idea of what they might have looked like several millennia ago. The art is of excellent quality, and much improved over the old game, but it is here that we get into the games major graphical problems—the cards are almost impenetrable to an unpracticed eye, and merely looking at them has a steep learning curve.

For starters, the art—while gorgeous—is generally not designed for a 1 ½” box on a card: it’s too detailed, too busy, and too dark to work on such a small scale. Good CCG card art should show strong character elements that can be easily recognized from across the table, yet most Horus Heresy cards show action or battle scenes that blend into a dark gray fog when seen at a distance—it can be difficult to tell what card you’re looking at unless you pick it up and study it, and sometimes even then it’s hard to decipher. The names don’t help, because they are not only sideways and crowded out by subtitles and background texture, but they are almost all nonsense words that even I, an avid fantasy reader and veteran of goofy made-up names, had trouble relating to. Give me a name like Hailfire Droid and I have a pretty good idea of what it might be, but what am I supposed to do with Gauste? Khorst? Rorrorg? A couple of made-up names add flavor, but too many of them quickly become overwhelming—they give no context or hint of use, and no solid handle for your mind to hold on to when trying to identify the card.

Combine these problems with a very small statline with some very subtle callouts, and you get cards that are often a chore just to read. Scanning your own battlefield can be hard enough already—scanning your opponent’s forces can be downright maddening. This problem is lessening with each game we play, of course, because we are getting to know the cards so well, but new players will have quite a hump to get over while trying to learn the game.

Visual problems aside, the game itself is very fun and very unique among CCGs, offering an elegant blend of card game and wargame that should delight deckbuilders and strategists alike. Go out and give Horus Heresy a try—you won’t be disappointed.

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Written by Fellfrosch on May 26th, 2005